The Loan

When the phone rang this morning I dreamed of
waking to answer it. In this dream, on the other end of the line, was Marie. She
was calling from far away, from some other country, someplace warm and full of
light. Her voice was full of light, and soft as ice in glass. She was sitting in
the sun, she said, and the sky was blue, and there was not a cloud. She told me,
laughter jiggling up through her words, how clear it all wasthe meaning of
it alland that the past was gone, and that she was going to stay forever.
How I wanted to be with her, and I tried in my mind to be with her, and I tried
to speak to her. And by nothing by the act of trying I crossed a line, and then,
as if from nothing but the darkness, my awareness of the dream as such was born,
a tiny, cold glow in the corner of my awareness, pale and spreading. The pale
light grew over and covered Marie's nimble chatter, and I let it fade, for, as
everyone knows, no matter how it begins, it is when the dream becomes a dream
that it begins to end.

And then
Sarah, next to me in bed, was nudging my shoulder with the real phone, and not
too gently anymore. "Wake up, wake up," she was saying.

"I'm
trying," were my first words of the day. The dream was gone but now I was
struggling to keep its memory, and I had not yet opened my eyes. "Strange.
I dreamed I was awake."

"Do you
usually dream that you're sleeping?" Sarah returned. "Take the phone,
will you? It's for you."

I was trying
hard to hold that dream, but already I was forgetting the sound of Marie's
voice. I put words to the sound, to try to describe it, but they only formed a
caricature around the echo. It's pointless to try to hold something beautiful
still.

"Who is
it?" I said.

"It's
Marie," Sarah answered.

Now this was
a bad start, even for a day set up to be bad. "Marie who?"

"Marie
Stalwart. Joe's Marie."

"Tell her
I'll call her back, and then hang up."

Sarah pressed
the receiver into my palm. "Don't be ridiculous. The day is here."

Powerful
words, those. The day is here. So I had to talk to Marie, with Sarah next to me
in our holy bed, close so that I could smell the warmth of her breath and feel
it on my neck. My heart was beating too fast so I slid away a little, for fear
that Sarah might feel the vibration of my pulse.

I put the
phone to my ear. Marie, whose sound sense was prone to deteriorate in tight
situations, had been recently making some bad mistakes. Calling me at home in
the morning was one. Another, that I became aware of yesterday, was her attempt
at stealing ninety thousand dollars from my oldest friend, her husband.

"Good
morning, Marie," I said.

She was in a
panic. "Kristian, I'm sorry, I had to call while Joe's in the shower; I
don't have very long. Honestly, I had meant to have explained everything to you,
but I was so scared. I've never seen Joe so worked up. How much have you told
him?"

"Nothing,
yet."

"Oh,
thank God. I knew you wouldn't tell him."

"I'm
having lunch with him today."

"What are
you going to tell him?"

"Marie,
why did you send that application to my company?"

"Because
I had to know whose side you were on. Joe has lots of friends. You're my only
friend. What are you going to tell Joe?"

"Nothing,
because you are going to call Sentinel right away and withdraw the application."

"Don't
ask me to do that."

"I'm not
asking."

"Oh, now
Joe's out of the shower." There was some rustling, and the sound of
footsteps. Her voice got very low. "Kristian?"

"Yes?"
"My application works, doesn't it?"

And then she
hung up.

Had she still
been listening, I would have answered that yes, statistically, the application
worked. But in the end it is people, not statistics, who do or do not pay the
loan back. I have never approved an application before it was clear to me who
exactly was going to pay.

In the case of
Marie's application, there was nothing that I wanted to do less than to have to
make that clarification.

"I hate
being hung up on," I said to Sarah as I handed the receiver back to her.
And then I turned again to face her, and I took a breath, and I opened my eyes.
This is an old habit of mine, and my favorite secret. My very first sight of
each and every day for the past seven years has been of Sarah. This is a secret
because Sarah doesn't know that I make a point of being sure she is next to me
and that I am facing her before opening my eyes. And there again was her face,
beautiful in dim light, soft lines across her forehead and falling from the
outside corners of her eyes. Maybe there was a new line this morning; I had
watched over the years each line fall, one by one, slowly from her eyes, across
completely smooth skin. Change within sameness, like the movement of clouds on
the sky, or fallen petals on a dish.

They showed
only in the morning, those lines; they were easy for her to cover. Only I knew
that they were there. Only I saw the way that I had worn on her.

I kissed her
matted hair, and her cheek, warm to the touch of my mouth.

"It looks
like Joe and she are having problems again," I said to her cheek.

"Worse
than ours?"

"Different.
Money problems, you could say."

At this Sarah
rolled her eyes. Joe's manic obsession with becoming and living completely
debt-free was well known in our circle. In his zeal he had a couple of times
found himself short of cash in the face of some contingency, and thereby
disposed to borrow from friends. Bourgeois asceticism, is what Sarah called it.

"Marie
never before had to bother you with money problems at six in the morning,"
she said.

"She had
to call while Joe was in the shower. She's keeping a secret from him."

"Oh. Big?"

"Pretty
big."

"Well, I
don't know if I could handle one more problem to have to worry about,"
Sarah saida semantically awkward conclusion, given its context, and I took
her meaning to be that she did not wish to be informed of and thereby involved
with some other couple's mess, on top of ours. Such was her right, since the
Stalwarts were friends from my side of the relationship. Joe I have known for
twenty years, since he kicked my butt on our high school soccer field, and I
have been with Sarah for only the last seven of those years.

Now, I think
Sarah was also telling me that her suspicion had in fact been aroused. I think
that she was trying to warn me.

Friends that
care to comment on Sarah's and my relationshipand they all dooften
posit that it is too regimented and that Sarah and I are too rigorously
egalitarian in our roles. For example, so that the other can catch an extra ten
or fifteen minutes of sleep, Sarah and I alternate turns to the right to the
first shower. Today was mine to shower first. Included with the right to the
shower is the duty to turn on the heat and to go to the kitchen to start the
coffee. Included with the duty to start the coffee is the option to finish
cleaning any dishes or other mess left from the night before.

Our friends
say that we have over-politicized our private lives. In fact, we need the
stability of routine more than others. Unlike some other relationships, ours is
not anchored to any abstract purpose.

This morning
in the kitchen there was quite a mess left from the night before. I winced. We
had scattered dinner around room last night instead of eating it. Dishes from
its aborted preparation were still in the sink, still dirty, and there was food
smeared over the counter and in blotches on the floor. There was, also, a
scattering of pink flower petals on the table, the petals as dry as dead skin
and pallid in vague morning light coming through the kitchen window. I blamed
the flower for last night's fight, which had been much worse than usual, more
grave and proceeding farther into the morning. I couldn't tell if, for that, it
had been more productive; it's not easy to resolve an argument about time. But
after months of fighting virtually the same fight over and over, clearly
something more was happening.

When I say "time,"
I mean the time that confers on us all the differences that we never sought out
and never asked for. I mean the time that changes what you thought could not be
changedchanges the way that we think, changes the shape of our minds; it
seems that the things we want, even the shapes of our memories change. You try
to stop it and you try, for safety, to look for some fixed point, something
solid, to moor onto. But you find eventually that what you're anchored to is
itself nothing more than a mere idea, an empty space, and time has kept moving,
and time has not passed you by. I try to explain to Sarah that in a
relationship, as in life, the struggle is to accept what time does, to work hard
to keep in touch with what is real, to resist the temptation to anchor onto a
dream. I think that Sarah has been trying to find a way to escape from change
and from the work of change. She has had enough of it, and wants to give up.

"What is
giving up?" Sarah said this morning. She was sitting at the table over the
newspaper, waiting for breakfast. Since I had the first shower, this was also my
day to make breakfast, which was going to be just toast and fried eggs. There
has evolved in our argument an awful terseness and efficiency of delivery, Sarah
rendering her lines between sips of coffee and mine returning between the
cracking of eggs and trips to the refrigerator.

"Giving
up," I said, tossing some pieces of bread into the toaster oven, "is
taking recourse in one idealization or another."

"But what
can one do without idealizations?"

I turned the
stove on and put some butter in the pan. "Be vigilant against them."

"But to
what end?" Sarah said, stirring sugar into her coffee.

"To the
end of staying in touch with the difficult, gray area that is reality, and that
is always changing."

If the lexicon
of our polemic seems too rhetorical or abstract, that is my fault, for I am,
paradoxically, congenitally given to thinking in the general rather than
specific, and Sarah is used to indulging me. But our point of contention was
specific enough.

After all our
arguing, and some honest talking and listening, I still did not understand the
reasons this morning as well as I am beginning to nowthe reasons, that is,
why Sarah had decided that she wanted to get married. Now I had conceded from
the beginning that ours is the kind of relationship that usually comes to
marriage, and that before the passing of seven years. Also true, however, is
that we had both brought with us to our relationship the conviction that we
would never be married, either to each other or to anyone else. This I still
held, but the years since then had played differently on Sarah.

"But now
I want to be with you forever," she would say.

"But
forever is an idealization, and marriage is a dream. I don't want to live a
dream."

"I want
to live that dream."

And there is
the crux. What makes it harder is that we have each other's sympathy. How I
would love to dream, to lift the veil and kiss her in the church and sleep in
the blessing of God. But I can't because I know, I know, that under that
blessing, that idea, that solid point, reality goes on; it's all on the books;
it's all on credit. Dreams undertaken always end, and then must be paid for.

"In that
dream, we stand to lose what is real," I say, and the argument usually
ends, without resolution, somewhere around there.

But the
momentum from last night was too great; something was happening, and this
morning Sarah had again something new to say. She was completely sincere. She
said it right from the heart.

"If you
don't marry me, Kristian, I think that our relationship will end."

For both of us
this was shocking to hear. It took time to hear, a time like the momentary
blindness that comes from stepping into new light. And then the light makes
things clearclearer than they were before, and everything looks different,
and memories are different. Sarah bowed the way she always bowsslowly at
the neck, with her back straightbefore beginning to cry. I left our eggs
on the stove and, muttering something meant to comfort, laid a hand on the back
of her head, stroked the top of her spine. We fear crying; it is a concession
that we are far too stubborn to make without shame. Sarah cries almost
noiselessly. Her breathing is deeper and wet.

"Sarah,"
I said.

"I'm not
trying to pressure you."

"I know."

"It just
now, all of a sudden, became clear to me that that's what will happen. Things
are moving that way."

"But
honey, that's the future."

"I can
tell about the future."

The kitchen
was filling with smoke from burning eggs and toast. "Sarah," I said, "there's
nothing we can't work through." My voice made a thin sound thoughclearly,
some things can't be worked through. I wonder what Sarah saw in the future this
morning, and if it was that future that made her so sad. I wonder if it's
because I am a man that I have never seen the future in that way. Wordlessly,
and without looking up, Sarah took my hand and let me lift her to her feet. She
put her arms around me. She rested her head against my chest. I must have a hint
of a father in my soul. I held her and rocked her slowly from side to side, just
as a father comforts a child. And Sarah held me. Is this where dancing comes
fromfrom giving comfort to suffering babies, when nothing else seems to
work. Not quite dancing, Sarah and I became each other's babies there, rocking
in the haze of burning toast and eggs, the smoke yellow from the morning glow of
the kitchen window, alone together in the midst of what she had said, where at
least its terrible unhappiness was our unhappiness, not my unhappiness against
hers. We both wished it to last, and Sarah pushed her lips to my ear and
whispered, let's spend this day together, we need a day together. And when I
refused, she said, then only a while longer this morning. But I couldn't. I had
to go to work. And so did she. I had to let go of her. I had to get ready for
work.

I am a
mid-level manager in the underwriting department at Sentinel Banking
Corporation, where applications for no-fee home equity loans from all over the
country are processed at the rate of two hundred or more in a day. We move fast
in my office; nothing gathers dust. For anyone in our department to miss any
given day brings considerable inconvenience, and I, supposedly a role model, was
already way behind. About thirty per day of those two hundred applications cross
my desk, all of them marginal, to be swiftly scrutinized and given judgment, yes
or no, survive or perish. There is no one else in the department who can
scrutinize as well as I, although there were at least twenty files on my desk
that should have been already completed.

The files had
gathered on my desk like logs in a jam in a matter of hours yesterday afternoon
because I spent the time thinking about Marie's application, and there is no
time at Sentinel to think; there is time only to process. My thinking anyway had
come to little. There was so little that I could actually do. Since
mathematically it was sound, I could not decline the application out of hand.
Because Joe might have answered his phone at home, I could not even call Marie.
Today everything rested on that Marie withdraw the application herself by noon.
Otherwise, I would have to meet Joe with her file still open. If I had to meet
Joe with Marie's file still open, I would have to find out whether or not Joe
was someone who was going to pay.

So at
eight-thirty, half an hour late, I pulled a tie over my ears and kissed Sarah
goodbye. Sarah is a real estate agent and had appointments scheduled today with
three prospective buyers. When I left her she was gathering herself, struggling
into her work clothes before the mirror with the averse sluggishness of someone
who is very cold. I couldn't think of anything comforting to say to her that
wouldn't make things seem better than they really were. So I just kissed her.

"Whose
turn is it to call?" she asked me. Sarah and I take turns, on alternate
days, calling each other at work. Yesterday was my day to call Sarah, but I had
forgotten.

"It's
still my turn," I said. "I'll call you this morning."

"When?"

"I'll
call you in an hour."

She gave me a
hard look. "Okay."

I put my
jacket on at the door and braced myself for the cold.

And it was
cold, colder than yesterday, the blue sky blemished with an assembly of
toddling, pointless clouds, pink-edged in morning light. The dry wind was back;
if there had been dew, it had dried. I paused to smell for spring to make just
sure that I couldn't, and I couldn'tnot a whisper. Spring can be smelt in
its essence only on its first day, flat against the backdrop of sterile winter,
and that day was yesterday. You can't know it from words, that smell, but when
you're there you can feel in your feet the twitch of new life in the dirt, and
feel on your skin damp pollen mixed in the breeze flitting through new leaves of
branches, pulling on yet bare branches stuffed with buds aching to bleed out
pink.

What happened
to the smell of spring, the push of it? Memories change, and leave a shell of
words. There was dew, yesterday, on the grass. Some purple and pink camellias
basking in the sun along the side of my neighbor's home were jeweled with dew,
and the way each drop reflected the light made it seem as if the dew on the
flower was so many stars against a circle of twilight sky. I longed to show
those flowers to Sarah and on that impulse I jogged across my neighbor's lawn
and clipped a camellia at its pedicel with my fingernails. Of course, the
instant the stem broke in my hand the drops on the petals ceased to glitter,
their angle against the sun having been altered. I no longer cared to show the
flower to Sarah, so I dropped it in my jacket pocket, and for the time being
forgot about it.

This morning I
found myself again, already late, jogging across my neighbor's yard to steal
another camellia, even then thinking how stupid it is to try to hold something
beautiful stillthat is, something that had been beautiful. I couldn't stop
myself.

Even though it
was late there was still traffic on the road. It seems as if every day a few
more cars need to find room on our undersized highways. When I finally reached
the Sentinel building it was well after nine. As luck would have it, my boss was
coming down the hall just as I was sneaking in. The man has a distinctively
massive gaithe was a linebacker in collegeand even his facial
features are still heavy with muscle, intimidating even at a distance. His big
lips turned down in a frown when he came close enough to see that I was just
arriving. I apologized with a shrug, penance of self-deprecation. He stopped me
anyway.

"I was
looking for you," he said. "Some people down the line were asking for
some files. I found them in your office, unfinished." He put two fingers to
his big, morning-smooth chin and gave it a stroke. "It looks a little rough
in there, you know. Looks like there's been a snag."

"It won't
take long to catch up," I said, lying.

"How
about if I get you a temp?"

"No,
thanks."

"Everyone
else is always begging me for temps."

"I don't
like temps. They're too transient. They can't be trusted."

My boss
considered this, his eyebrows slowly folding in to a point. "My daughter is
doing temp work."

"Well,
that's different, of course."

I am prone to
gaffs like this, and my boss knows me well enough not to take them too
seriously. He was right to be concerned with the state of my office, and has
never been shy of reminding me of my shortcomings, and there are a few, as a
mid-level manager. My staff of underwriters do not always perform to their
potential, and though they respect me professionally, I think they regard me
personally as being socially stiff if not misanthropic. In spite of this, I have
never been seriously scolded by my boss or any other superior, for there is, as
I said, no one at Sentinel who can as reliably as I divine the potential of a
marginal application. So marked is my skill that to both my superiors and my
team of underwriters I am a kind of spectacle. Only twice in three years have I
given my approval to loans that proved bad. In the past people have given up
their lunch hours to watch me work, try to figure out my trick. Some think I'm a
psychic.

I can explain.
There is no trick.

First, let me
generalize and say that there are basically two kinds of people who find
themselves disposed to bring to the altar what is likely to be their largest
financial asset and apply for a no-fee home equity loan. First, there are those
who are seeking a loan as a means to begin a dream. By the numbers, these people
are more likely to qualify. They are younger, have cleaner credit histories,
shorter tax forms. They tend to be still in their first marriages, have stable
employment, and fewer children. So far, they have lived modestly, and don't need
the extra cash to subsidize their quotidian lives. The fact is, they want to
leave them altogether. Restive and bored, they long to escape from their
prudent, safe, day-to-day grinds, and they believe that they have earned the
right, and in a sense they have, to try. They believe that there is a life for
them definitively better, some privileged, happier mode of being.

I don't
believe that there is such a life, for anyone. But that is not my business. All
these people want from us is a boost. I decide whether or not to give it to
them.

The second
kind of applicantthe kind not asking to begin a dreamis the kind
that has woken up from one. Their files are exponentially more complicated and
difficult to process. These people are partners in failing corporations or the
owners of bankrupt small businesses. Or in the aftermath some indulgence or
another that they thought would never end, they find themselves suited with
impossible, somehow unforeseen debts. Or they have, after failed marriages,
enormous alimony and spousal support obligations. They are as cunning as they
are desperate, and the applications they send us are tangled with obscurities.
They submit incomplete or fraudulent tax returns, fictionalized profit and loss
statements, forged pay-stubs, W-2's, and social security documents. They hide
debts, evade credit bureaus. They pose, on the phone, as their own employers for
jobs they no longer have. They direct appraisers to houses they don't own.

A good
underwriter could spend a week picking through one of these applications without
finding every discrepancy and deception. Why then is my judgment so infallible?
An application is more than a mass of statistics. An application is a biography,
a life, a personality. And in the sum of all the numbers, at the root of all the
lies, is a person who either has or has not yet in his or her life come to
understand what it means to have to paya person whose vision does or does
not extend in real terms beyond the fact of getting the money. While dissecting
a marginal applicationone which mathematically works but is for some
reason suspiciousI'm looking for the person who will not feel, when he or
she gets the money, that everything is settled, that everything from then on
will be all right.

Not everyone
knows what it means to have to pay. It is no easy thing to believe that nothing
is free.

I took a
breath and switched on my office light. Stacks of files were lined along the
edges of my desk like bulwarks, unread memos and faxes of varying import stuck
between them, a timeline like fossils in layers of earth. Our department is an
inexorably efficient mechanism, and does not long abide such a clog. The people
in funding were waiting for these files with their fingernails chewed to the
nubs.

My voice-mail
was full with twenty-three messages. I keyed in my password and began to skip
through thema blather of words from staff, clients, bosseslistening
for the sound of Marie's voice. At the same time I reached under my desk to turn
on my computer; there was the vaguely grinding whir of its booting up. To make
room for my mouse I moved a stack of files to the floor. I began to scroll
through the phone logs.

This fact is
the centerpiece of our marketing strategy: Sentinel can process your home equity
loan, with no cost to you, in ten days. Try to get a library card in ten days. I
was doing my part, in fact quite in my stride yesterday afternoon when one of my
younger underwriters came to me with an unusual application submitted by a woman
who, although married, wished to take a loan on one hundred and seventy thousand
dollars of home equity singly, that is, without the formal consent of her
husband, with whom the home was owned jointlyan endeavor which is
technically legal in this state since only one party of a home owned jointly is
required to be present at the signing of the closing documents.

I skimmed very
quickly through the file. The problem was as novel as it was obvious. While the
purpose of the loan was listed as "debt consolidation," the applicant
had, according to her credit report, virtually no debt aside from the fifty
thousand still owed on the home.

"Hidden
debt?" my underwriter suggested.

"Possibly,
but I guess she wants the money for something else." I snapped the file
shut and gave it back to her. "You had better give this woman a call, try
to get some clarification."

My underwriter
nodded. "As long as I have to talk to her, should I also ask her why she's
applying singly?"

"No,
we're not allowed to ask that."

"Can I
talk to her husband?"

"No."

About ten
minutes later a call came through to my desk. It was Joe.

"Some
woman from your office just called here asking to speak with Marie," he
said. "She wouldn't tell me what she wanted."

It was a
moment before I could answer. "That's strange," I said.

"Why
would anyone from Sentinel Banking be calling Marie?"

"I don't
know."

"Well do
you think that you could find out what's going on for me?"

Not so much
because he is a calm person as that he is so solidly repressed, Joe almost never
expresses surprise or anger overtly. Typically, even when there is a serious
problem, Joe has a convincing, almost religious way of carrying himself as if he
were above it. But I could not think of a time since, in high school, when he
kicked my butt on the soccer field, that Joe had been this abrupt with me.

"I can
check the phone logs," I said.

"So
you'll look into it, then." "I'll check the logs."

"I just
want to make sure our names aren't floating around where they shouldn't be. You
know how important that is to us."

"I'll
check around," I said. By then I was waving my young underwriter back to
me, motioning with my hands for her to bring the file, so that by the time I
hung up with Joe I had already laid eyes on what is normally overlooked as the
only truly superfluous piece of information in any given file: the applicant's
name.

"So I've
heard," my young underwriter replied, and she went back to her desk.

It was about
five years ago that Joe, for reasons more philosophical, if not paranoid, than
practical, endeavored to make his household, once and for all, wholly free of
debt. He liquefied inherited assets to pay for their cars and to settle Marie's
lingering student loan, and paid off and closed each of their dozen or so credit
card accounts. Their only remaining obligation in fact was their mortgage, which
to end Joe and Marie had for five years been making all kinds of sacrificesof
their lifestyles, their IRA's, vacations. Joe is not a typical miser. He holds
that with debtlessness comes a higher order of freedom. Higher in the
transcendent sense.

I disagree
with Joe about almost everything. He is a Democrat and I, a Republican. He likes
Bach. I prefer Mozart. I had for years believed that Joe and I were still
friends primarily because our friendship was never formally dissolved. I think
we believed, when it began, that our friendship was the friendship to end all
friendships. Perhaps it was; I can't say that I've been as tight with another
man as I once was with Joe. Maybe it's because of that that I could not bring
myself to believe it when, in college, I started to feel the heart of Joe's and
my alliance fade. And since I myself could not accept that change, of course I
could hardly rouse the courage to confess it to Joe. How does one say such a
thing? How does a man tell another man that he no longer cares so much for his
happiness?

I never
learned how, and neither did Joe, and for that reason my friendship to Joe
hardened, over time, into one which was both ostensibly central to my life and
yet made mostly of gestures. For example, I served, when he married Marie, as
Joe's best man. There was no one in that church who knew Joe better. But there
was also no one who was less like him.

Marie mostly
kept to herself how unhappy she was in her and Joe's marriage; I think she
confided only in me. She didn't mind so much the imposed frugality, but, as she
put it, Joe's and her souls were distant. He didn't know her. She was lonely. I
pondered Marie's file looking for some other explanation, though knowing I
wouldn't find it. It would take time to believe that Marie was, in effect,
stealing from her husband their one meaningful asset.

It was a few
minutes before five, when my underwriters were cleaning off their desks and
getting ready to leave, when I realized with a moan that I had forgotten to call
Sarah. Embarrassingly, I moaned out loud. Some people standing outside my door
turned to look. I made, ridiculously, like I had coughed, and put a Kleenex to
my mouth.

"Are you
okay?" someone said.

"I'm late
for something," I answered, to make my hurrying out, and the mess I was
leaving behind, seem a little less precipitate.

Before
yesterday I had never failed to call Sarah when it was my turn, and she likewise
had never forgotten to call me. I was frozen with fear, and all the way home I
endeavored to think of some meaningful way to apologize, futilely, since I have
no skill at preparing words in advance for any given situation. I made a mental
list of strategies to avoid: don't say that you were too busy to call, I told
myself. Don't try to downplay the error. Never try to change the subject.

Have
confidence, I said to myself. In the face of the moment, the right words will
come.